‘At the beginning of August I thought the chance had arrived. That was when we arrested several members of the gang after they tried to rob a farmhouse in Pontós, near Figueras, and they crashed their car on the Bàscara bridge while trying to outrun a police car; one of them died in the accident and another ended up a quadriplegic, but I was able to interview the other two in the station. During the interrogations I confirmed without any room for doubt that the gang I was looking for was Zarco’s gang. That was the good news; the bad news was that I realized that Zarco wasn’t a typical quinqui like the others and catching him was going to be more difficult than I’d thought. The two gang members I interrogated were called Chino and Drácula. I knew them from the district, just like the rest, and I knew they were Zarco’s subordinates and not tough guys, so, when I started interrogating them, what I was after was not to charge them with the frustrated robbery of the farmhouse in Pontós and a few other jobs — I was already taking that for granted — what I wanted, as well, was for them to give up Zarco and the rest of the gang, but especially Zarco, because I was sure that bringing down Zarco would bring down the whole gang. Although to be honest, that’s also what I would have been after if Chino and Drácula had been tough guys and hadn’t just been mere subordinates.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What I mean is that back then everything was possible in the station, not like now, for us that was still a time of — how shall I put it? — impunity; there’s no other word: although Franco had been dead for three years, at the station we did whatever we liked, which is what we’d always done. That’s the reality; later, as I say, things changed, but that’s what it was like then. And, frankly, in those circumstances, it was unlikely that a sixteen-year-old kid, no matter how tough, would endure, without caving in and singing everything singable, the seventy-two hours we could hold him in a station house before bringing him before a judge, seventy-two hours without the right to a lawyer that the kid would spend between a darkened cell and interrogations lasting hours and hours during which the odd fist might slip, and that would be a best-case scenario for him. Frankly difficult, like I say. So imagine my surprise when Chino and Drácula held out. How do you like that? The thing is that’s the way it went: they took all they had no choice but to take, but they didn’t give up Zarco.’
‘Do you have an explanation for that display of bravery?’
‘Sure: that it was no display of bravery; in other words: Chino and Drácula were more scared of Zarco than they were of me. That’s why I said that was when I realized that Zarco was a real tough guy and catching him was going to be harder than I’d thought.’
‘I’m surprised you say Zarco was a real tough guy; for some reason I’d got the idea that you thought he was just unfortunate.’
‘And he was. But real tough guys are almost always unfortunate men.’
‘It also surprises me to hear you say his friends were scared of him.’
‘You mean the kids in his gang? Why does that surprise you? The soft ones fear the tough guys. And, maybe with the odd exception, the kids in Zarco’s gang were softies; so they were scared of him. Starting with Chino and Drácula.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I told you already: because, if they hadn’t been very afraid of Zarco, they wouldn’t have spent seventy-two hours in the station house without giving him up. Believe me. I was with them during those three days and I know what I’m talking about. And as far as whether or not Zarco was really a tough guy, just look at what he did after Guille’s death and the arrest of the others.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Getting hold of guns and starting to hold up banks.’
‘I’ve heard that back then it was less dangerous to rob a bank than a gas station or a grocery store.’
‘That’s what Zarco said.’
‘And isn’t it true?’
‘I don’t know. It’s true that the person behind the counter of a gas station or a grocery store was sometimes the proprietor and might feel tempted to resist the robbery, while the employees of banks would almost never entertain such crazy thoughts for the simple reason that they wouldn’t lose anything in the robbery of the bank, which anyway had the deposits in all their branches insured and gave their employees orders that in the case of a heist not to run needless risks and hand over the money without a second thought; and it’s also true that back then we hadn’t imposed the security measures on banks that two or three years later were obligatory and finally ended the craze for bank robberies: armed guards, double entrance doors for branches, security cameras, bullet-proof enclosures for the tellers, hidden retractable drawers, correlatively numbered bank notes, push buttons that activated alarms that sounded in the headquarters or even at the police stations. . Anyway: all that’s true. But, man, it’s also true that it takes balls to walk into a bank armed with a rifle, threaten the employees and customers and make off with the money that’s there; especially if you’re sixteen years old, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s what Zarco started to do in the middle of that summer. And by doing that he began to run greater risks every time. And, the greater the risks he ran, the closer we came to the moment of catching him.
‘It seemed to be coming, but it didn’t arrive. During the month of August, while the pressure from my bosses grew to crush this gang as soon as possible, we were on the brink of catching them a couple of times (one afternoon at the beginning of August, near Sils, after they hit a gas station that we knew they’d been lurking around the previous day because the owner had filed a complaint, Hidalgo and Mejía chased them by car until flipping over on an embankment while they got away; in Figueras, a couple of weeks later, a Civil Guard thought he recognized them outside a bank and followed them for several kilometres, but also ended up losing them). The fact is that by the beginning of September I was desperate: I’d been working on the case for two months and things had only got worse; Deputy Superintendent Martínez and Inspector Vives knew it, so when they came back from their holidays they put me between a rock and a hard place: either I solved the problem or they’d have to assign someone else to solve it. Relieving me of the case would have been a tremendous failure, so I got my act together and in the second week of September found out that Zarco’s gang was going to hold up a bank in Bordils.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I found out.’
‘Who told you?’
‘I can’t tell you that. There are things a policeman cannot say.’
‘Even when thirty years have gone by since they happened?’
‘Even if sixty had gone by. Look, I once read a novel where one character said to another: Can you keep a secret? And the other replied: If you can’t keep it yourself, why should I keep it for you? We cops are like priests: if we’re no good at keeping secrets, we’re no good as cops. And I’m good at being a cop. Even if the secret is a trivial one.’
‘Is this one?’
‘Do you know any that aren’t?’
‘Cañas thinks he was responsible. Apparently, two days before the Bordils hold-up he was drinking beer with Córdoba, an old district character he’d befriended.’
‘I remember that guy.’
‘Cañas thinks he might have got carried away and told Córdoba about the planned heist and Córdoba took the tale to you.’
‘It’s not true. But if it was true I’d still tell you it wasn’t true. So don’t insist.’
‘I won’t insist. Go on about the Bordils hold-up.’
‘What do you want me to tell you? I suppose, when I add it all up, it’s one of the most complicated operations I set up in my whole career. I can’t say I didn’t have the time and resources to prepare it, but the truth is I was so reckless that Zarco and company were on the brink of getting away. My only justification is that back then I was an ambitious greenhorn and I’d expended so much effort to nab Zarco that I didn’t want to put him in jail just to have him released a few months later. That’s why the operation I set up was designed to catch Zarco once he’d committed the heist and not before, so the crime he’d be charged with wouldn’t be a minor offence or an attempted offence and that the judge could lock him away for a good long time. Of course, letting Zarco act in this way, not arresting him before he went into the branch office and held up the bank, meant running an enormous risk, a risk I shouldn’t have run and only a couple of years later wouldn’t have run. Keep in mind that we couldn’t give the manager or employees of the branch prior warning, so they wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag and not to alarm them over nothing, because we couldn’t be sure our tip-off was good, or even, supposing it was true, that Zarco wouldn’t back out at the last minute. In any case, the truth is that Martínez and Vives came through, they trusted me and gave me command of the operation and half the squad: eight police inspectors in four undercover radio cars. Those were the forces at my disposal. First thing in the morning I put a car on the way into town and, as time went on, the rest of us set about positioning ourselves discreetly (one on the way out of town, another in the parking lot to the left of the branch and mine twenty metres in front of it), in such a way that, when we finally saw Zarco and two of his guys go into the branch after midday, the trap was set to close around them.